I can't remember the last time I wrote something by hand for someone else to read. As long as I can read what I wrote, I don't care how shitty my handwriting is, and I'd wager it's the same for most people.

I see taking notes like writing code. I write code as if it’s to be read and understood by “me, 6 months from now”. And let me tell you, “me from 6 months ago” can be an idiot at times. But ever since I started with that mindset, my code quality has gotten better, and it is vastly easier to understand.

Notes are the same way, but even more explicit. You largely aren’t writing notes to be consumed while the topic is still fresh in your head and you can remember what your cryptic scratches were meant to convey. You are writing for you in the future when you can remember what a particular acronym was or why you wrote “important!!! - check kobernets out”.

This is an excellent point, and basically all of why I worked out the indexing scheme I've mentioned elsewhere today. An aide-memoire is only as good as the aid it can provide, and the index largely unbinds it in time - if I need something from a year ago, it's no harder to find than when it was from yesterday.

It takes a few minutes a day to maintain the index and keep it current, but only a few minutes, and that time is amply repaid by the benefits in utility.

Likewise, I'll sometimes spend the few minutes after a meeting expanding on my notes with context, thoughts for further action or research, etc. This stuff can be hugely useful both in the short term and especially in the long, when I'm revisiting or reconsidering a project and rebuilding the threads of context I had when it was last at the center of my focus.

On the whole, I think the general rule here is that taking notes is a good start, but what really makes them count is putting some thought and effort into taking that raw material and turning it into an accessible and useful mnemonic tool.

And that brings us back to the reMarkable's shortcomings, not least of which is that it offers no way to actually do that. It's all the more frustrating for how the platform clearly could support this capability, maybe in ways genuinely not seen in human history before now - but, as it currently is, it can't even provide the same utility you could get with a quill and hand-laid pages in the 1600s.

Yah, this is majorly true. I discovered at exam time my freshman year that I couldn't read my class notes. I then did a major upgrade to my lettering technique :-)

(I had never taken notes before.)

The "undo" functionality, in my experience, is not amazing because it provides an enhanced eraser. It's amazing because it allows you step backwards through your free-hand thoughts.

As an example, I routinely use my tablet like a whiteboard for working out bits of math. The ability to bring back a value I'd previously erased to see exactly where I miscalculated is extremely useful. Similarly, I find this sort of thing to be really helpful when whiteboarding my way through a particularly thorny programming problem at work.

I used to say the same, and then found myself surprised by how difficult it is to go back and read even my own old handwriting compared to how it is now, enough so that I feel I've done myself a favor by putting in the effort to improve it.

Like good headphones, it seems to be one of those things where you don't know what you're missing until you know what you're missing.

That's interesting. Maybe I should work on improving my handwriting. For now I just really love the undo feature, and I specifically use when I look at something I wrote and think "I wont be able to read that in the future" :-)

That's entirely fair! And I don't mean to sound as if, using a pen, I never find the need to just scratch something out and try again. But these days it's maybe once a page, where looking back to the first volume of my diary from back in 2018, it was more like once a line.

And in general, I find a real benefit in facility of writing to facility of thought - not falsely is it said that we think a little differently when writing vs. typing, and each kind of thinking is both valuable and not precisely replicable in the other medium. Being able to write neatly, at a speed approximating that at which I think, has made it a lot easier to fix thoughts in a form that allows me to work with them.

Were you brought up writing, and did you do most of your schoolwork writing? I think that might have an impact.

As kids today begin typing more than writing, I think the perspective of writing facilitating thought might change.

The implications for this are interesting long-term, as humanity's methods of thought entry change. In the future we likely will one day revert to machine-assisted oral entry.

Quite the contrary, really. I actually started typing at age six, much earlier than most of my cohort, and used pen and paper mostly under protest as a child and especially a teenager. Years on MU*s in my teens and 20s, and probably on the order of a million words of prose expended in roleplaying, left me with no interest in paper save for the most evanescent of purposes.

So when I picked up that first Metropolitan and Amazon Basics notebook in 2018, it was more for the sake of it than anything, and with no real expectation of persevering - indeed, having surprised myself with the discovery that the medium really does make a difference has no small amount to do with why I've kept up the practice to the tune of around 1500 diary pages and several A5 books filled with work notes.

(While I'm singing the praises of the old ways, I suppose I should mention that a good hand, with a good pen, also doesn't hurt to use. When it doesn't take any force to clearly mark the paper, you can write pages at a time with barely a pause and never feel it in your wrist. Granted I do also have a writer's bump now, but I'm not a hand model, so that's not really a drawback!)

That was me, until the various recent lockdowns, when I've started writing letters to people.

Concentration is hard when I want to write quickly "just for myself", but force myself to slow down to make sure what I mail is readable.

It's a fun process, far harder than typing, but very worthwhile.